Star Trek: For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky Rewatch

October 10, 2015 3:51 PM - Season 3, Episode 8

The Enterprise must deflect an asteroid on a collision course with an inhabited planet...but discover the asteroid is a spaceship with a population unaware of the outside world.

"For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" was aired by NBC on November 8, 1968 and was written by Rik Vollaerts, and directed by Tony Leader (legal name: Anton Morris Leader).

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The episode can be viewed on Netflix and Amazon Prime.

posted by Benway (4 comments total)

"For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" may be one of my favorite episode titles. There's something so 60's/70's sci-fi poetic about it (maybe just because it reminds me of the Harlan Ellison title "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" in sentence structure).

The episode itself isn't a favorite; couldn't really buy McCoy's love-&-marriage-at-first-sight storyline, terminal illness notwithstanding. But I did like the scene with the old man.
posted by oh yeah! at 9:55 AM on October 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

One thing I never picked up on all these years that I read in Benway's links is that the foolish old man who gives us the title is played by the same actor who appeared as the leader of the survivors of Vina's party on Talos IV in the pilot. The character gets a musical cue in the sound track here that's a quote from the music in the pilot, that as far as I know, hadn't been used since. Nice.

*  *  *
I'm still a little unclear about how Yonada works.

• They do and don't understand that there's an outside.
• They do and don't understand that there are other places outside for people to come from.
• They do and don't know that Yonada is hollow.
• Natira sez, "Welcome to Yonada". Why would she say that if she didn't understand the actual situation wrt Yonada existing in a larger universe? Would an ancient Greek, Egyptian, etc. say to a stranger, "Welcome to Earth"?
• They don't have oceans, but Natira knows what a 'ship' is and is shocked to hear Yonada called one.
• The old man climbed what mountains? How'd he get there? How did climbing them let him touch the sky?
• Do they mean that he found his way to the surface and the knowledge that there is a surface is what was forbidden? Well then, how is it that Natira and her red-dashikis were able to take the Spiral Starecase* up to the surface to capture the Feds? And on the way down, there's a whole crowd of people staring at them as they descend. So what exactly was the forbidden knowledge?
• Why was he punished for telling about it years later, rather than when he was doing it?
• About that sky: why is it red? Yonada's only 200 miles across -- and it's hollow. Doesn't seem like it would have the mass to retain a breathable atmosphere at all after 10,000 years.
• Even if it did, it hasn't been orbiting a star all this time, and it isn't orbiting one now. Yet, there are the Feds, the red-kimonas, and Natira in her backless gown, passing the time of day with a bit of lethargic swordplay and space judo, when it should be about the temperature of liquid nitrogen out there.
• As to humanlings living on so small a body: shouldn't they all be taking giant steps and caroming off the walls of their hollow ball in the micro-gravity, or flying around on artificial wings, or maybe wearing lead boots to keep their feet on the highly polished floors? Okay, you might go to some fan geek site like this and find some creative rationalizations:

  The Creators . . . constructed Yonada out of a hollowed-out asteroid. Using shaped anti-matter charges they compressed an asteroid into a collapsed matter core and then bombarded it with carbon to build a diamond shell around the core, giving the ship artificial gravity. The Creators then built the ship around the collapsed matter core, and covered it with an asteroidal surface - which was the best method available to them to protect the ship from debris and radiation.

  Well that's nice retconning, but it doesn't fit the technology that the episode shows us was available to the Fabrini. The Federation and their playmates don't have that level of technology now, and they aren't reduced to atomic-powered sub-light travel. Star Trek storytelling routinely employs nuclear power and weapons to signal ancient, primitive, or inferior (to the Feds) technology. Yonada has no phasers, disruptors, photon torpedos, or deflector shields, either. The rock got our attention in the first place by launching nuke-tipped ISBMs at the big E. That site also claimed the Creators put 40 million Fabrini aboard Yonada. That seems a bit cramped. Maybe they're related to the Gideons. I'll accept polywaterdoodlalldaycythemia and love-at-first-sight before I buy Yonada. ------------------------ * OK, it might've been the Brooklyn Bridge. All those late 1960s blue-eyed soul vocal groups look alike to me.

posted by Herodios at 7:14 PM on October 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

The bottom of that post was supposed to look like this:

. . . The rock got our attention in the first place by launching nuke-tipped ISBMs at the big E.

That site also claimed the Creators put 40 million Fabrini aboard Yonada. That seems a bit cramped. Maybe they're related to the Gideons.

I'll accept polywater doodlallday cythemia and love-at-first-sight before I buy Yonada.

------------------------
* OK, it might've been the Brooklyn Bridge. All those late 1960s blue-eyed soul vocal groups look alike to me.

posted by Herodios at 7:23 PM on October 11, 2015

That site also claimed the Creators put 40 million Fabrini aboard Yonada. That seems a bit cramped.

I dunno how thick the crust/hull is supposed to be, but it we assume 10 miles than the surface area of a sphere with radius 90 miles is 102K mi2. This gives a population density of 392 /mi2, or between Florida and New York.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:02 AM on October 12, 2015